Slashdot Mirror
Google Removing Ad-Blockers From Play
SirJorgelOfBorgel writes "It appears Google has begun removing ad-blocker apps for Android from the Play store, citing breaches of the Play Store Developer Distribution Agreement. The apps would be welcome back as soon as they no longer violated the agreement, though that doesn't seem possible while keeping the apps' core functionality intact."
Update: 03/18 20:06 GMT by U L : You can still easily install ad blockers using F-Droid, the Free Software only replacement for Play.
Mozilla could really use some new users. Wonder how many will be "switching back" instead?
You did not agree to spam when purchased your Android device or did you?
At least Android is open enough to allow installation from outside the Play Store.
Though after the initial availability this change of heart does surprise me.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
World's largest ad-pusher seeks to push more ads.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
(From a Linux geek still happy with a "dumbphone", but considering Android)
Can you use Android without serving yourself up to Google?
Is it true that you have to have a Google account to start up your phone?
Can you (easily) install apps by just downloading them to your computer and then transferring to the phone?
Do you have to give up your credit card info and name/address to sign up for the Google app store? (In light of the recent story that app developers get all your info, I don't know if I want every 2-bit app to get that info. The info itself could be worth more than the 99 cents for the application.)
Also, do free apps also get your personal information?
Any hints or links re: using Android without the all-seeing eye?
Builtin app replacement recommendations?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
At least we know why they gave Android away for free - it was so they would have a route to shove mobile advertisements down our throats.
It's called paying for apps.
Of course they did. This threatens their business model. A corporation will do ANYTHING to defend its cashflow. Any corporation, even Google. You want to play in their walled garden- you have to do it by their rules.
:)
I'm quite glad Android is not completely closed, and projects like F-Droid exist:
http://f-droid.org/
It's not half as good as official Google store at the moment, but it's open source, and it will get improved.
As for me, I won't be happy until I can apt-get install apps on my mobile
--Coder
You still have a choice in phones and their operating systems, yes? What 'shoving' is taking place, exactly? Where is the 'evil' in offering another platform option?
You don't like Android's "free + ads", go try iOS, Windows Phone, Firefox OS, Ubuntu Mobile etc. Maybe try a less-restrictive app store, or (heaven forbid) just sideload an ad-blocker. Android still offers you those choices too.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
If you like an app, pay the dollar or two for the ad free version, other wise you're stealing from the developer of the app, justify it however you like, but it is theft.
I'm not exactly a power droid user, but ad-blocking is absolutely something that will push me to go look outside of the google store. Is that really what they want to do?
The subject says it all, but unpacking the two issues:
- We need a GNU (or Debian) fork of Android so that key user protections like a preconfigured Netfilter firewall are available out of the box, as well as a root account and full set of root admin tools. Google's protection of advertisers by giving apps free reign once you've installed them needs to end.
- We need a GNU (or Debian) fork of Google Play to carry full-source free software apps including ad blockers and other forms of user-based control, like a NoScript equivalent. Google is utterly not on the user's side in this regard, and their hegemony needs to end. Our devices belong to us, not to Google.
Screw you Apple and your walled ...
What?
Oh...
Awkward...
I'm gonna get modded down here for bringing Apple into this, but it is relevant and is exactly an example of why having alternative app sources is important for users. I've long held that Apple must be forced to allow apps installed from third-party sources and here is an exact reason as to why that would be beneficial. Want to install something that the vendor agrees with? You can do it with Android thanks to the Amazon store, F-droid, and the like. And in all honesty, it's somewhat fair of Google to do this - if they've put up the Play Store, then they should have the right to determine what gets sold on it.
But the problem with Apple and the Iphone ecosystem is that you don't have any such choice - once you buy an Iphone, you do what Apple tells you and that's the end of the story, until you go to the lengths of exploiting the operating system to install what you like. And I don't want to hear that it's not a problem because Apple doesn't have a monopoly, which should somehow enable them to impose their decisions on their customers. We've seen such a backlash in the US over the people's right to unlock their phone's bootloader because once you buy it, it's yours. How is that different in the case of Apple forcing you to install only apps that they approve of? Once you buy it, it's yours - you should be able to run whatever you want on it if you should also have the right of unlocking it and doing what you wish. And you shouldn't have to go to the lengths over exploiting the OS in order to do it.
Regardless, I'm not an Android or Google fanboy (anymore, if I ever was one to begin with), and though they are in general better than Microsoft and Apple, they are distancing themselves from the goodness that comes from non-profit producers such as Mozilla. I'm pretty much set on dumping Android if/when I replace my phone in the next few years, and it's their vigorous policy towards advertising wiht such utter disregard for privacy that is pushing me that way. If there's one thinig I hate as a consumer, it's being treated like a sheep. Seems like FirefoxOS, Ubuntu Mobile, or crazily enough, maybe even Blackberry is the way to go.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
I just unchecked the box that said "Allow some non-intrusive advertising" in ABP, and dropped all of the exceptions from Ghostery and NoScript. Now I'm back to no advertising at all.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I can understand why people ad-block - especially web pages.
However, developers get a slice of the ad-revenue when the ads are presented via their apps.
I have an android phone & tablet and free apps with advertising and I've also paid for apps too - usually to disable ads or shock horror actually find an app useful and pay the developer a fair price.
If you like an app enough then buy it (in most cases just a few pounds) or if you are not willing to pay for an app you'll have to put up with ads instead.
If you want to ad-block something fine but remember you may be hurting the app developers too.
I remember a decade ago when people were always debating the next "killer ap". Well, we found it. It was AdBlock.
I just spent two hours reading about crazy people destroying their livers to increase their mental capacity by 10% (I doubt it's more than that from the spelling errors). Why? One can get as much boost (at least during your Internet time) from any good ad-blocking program with no damage to your liver at all.
If the mountain of crap won't stay away from Muhammad then Muhammad must stay away from the mountain of crap.
So it's not much of a loss either way.
You can't shop at the Play Store unless you are willing to be relentlessly bombarded with ads and your entire life's every moved tracked to improve the bottom line of Google Corporation.
Google doesn't just make glasses. They want to own your eyeballs as well.
Just go to F-Droid (alternative store) and install AdAway. Problem solved.
Today was not a good day for Google. First Google Reader and now this.
Boggles my mind how some educated people still see this all-knowing mega-corporation as nice and friendly.
Had on occasions thought I should set up an app blocker, but never got around to it, and probably wouldn't have if I hadn't been reminded of it by this article, which wouldn't have been written if....etc.
So basically thanks for reminding me google, I've been meaning to do this for ages.
Accepting advertising or not should be switchable at any time by the end user, because the device belongs to the end user. Much of the time we don't mind the advertising, but at other times we do, it can be intrusive and violates our privacy.
Google make it impossible to stop advertising once you've installed an app, because they view Android not as a service to users but as a service to them and to their advertisers. Google is not on our side.
Advertising should be opt-in, controlled by the user at any time. Developers will do just fine, and if they can't cope with a world in which users are in control then good riddance to them. There is no shortage of professional developers happy to respect end-user control.
Considering the most efficient ad blockers (AdKill is my favorite) only work on rooted devices, and only a minority of users root their phones/tablets, I don't see this having any serious impact on the user experience.
And if you can root your phone, you can certainly enable sideloading and say fuck you to Google Play.
Would it be possible to have an app in the Play Store that had two modes?:
1) if the presence of a certain code bundle was detected, exec that.
2) if it's missing, bring up a web browser and point to the website for the user to download it, then provide for a guided copy/install.
I'm assuming the Play Store already prohibits direct code downloads, but if not that would be even easier.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
There are a lot of developers that provide a "free" app whose revenue comes from allowing advertisements to appear somewhere on the screen. Assuming these adblockers would also block those ads, anyone using them would be cutting the revenue of those kind devs who released their apps for free. And if that's the case, then I think what Google is doing is justifiable.
This hypothesis was made on the basis of zero research and two cups of coffee :)
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
I can live with ads. I do not LIKE them, but I can generally deal - if they aren't overly animated flashing annoying things. What I want to block, with extreme prejudice, are any and all tracking bugs (they ain't features!). Ain't nobody's business where I am, where I was, or what I looked at. If you make a sale, then you get know that you made a sale. DONE.
Never seen it? Obama uses it regularly. For example, he argued that destroying people's cars would help the economy because they'd buy new ones. He called it "cash for clunkers". That's textbook Broken Window.
That one was doubly fallacious because he also argued that in a crisis brought on by people getting mortgages they couldn't actually afford, the solution was to sign them up for new car payments they couldn't afford.
I'd be willing to bet that you never heard of Android before Google, the marketing company, bought it. So Android marketing worked on you. If you're glad you have Android, marketing worked FOR you.
However, getting rid of old cars can provide a benefit in terms of fuel efficiency and better exhaust emmissions, so it's a tad more complex than the typical broken window fallacy. I personally doubt that the benefit outweighs the cost of building/buying the new car, so your point still stands.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
It's not about you. They don't want prospective app developers to see adblockers when they're looking at the Play Store.
I'm glad i don't have android. samsung didn't work for me :(
I, as an ISP, is running NXDOMAIN.
That means that my users can not see your advertisement regardless of what you do, since it's blocked on the DNS level.
I use ad blocking software on an old android phone my young (3 yrs old) son uses as a games/video machine. I buy all the apps that have a paid version - even if the only difference between the paid version and the free one is no ads, which I wouldn't see anyway with the ad blocking software. Anyone making a good educational or entertaining app deserves some income from it, and I'm quite prepared to pay.
But having ads is less than useless for his age range. He can't read. He doesn't understand them. Some of them are not suitable for his age, and app developers don't seem to take account of that. Every time he touched an ad, he would have to come to me to get him back to the app he was actually interested in, which was a constant source of annoyance to both him and me.
Some paid apps have in-app ads, trying to cross or up-sell extra levels or something - presumably to the parents, since the child can't understand them. That is what I primarily use the ad blocking software for. It enables my son to actually use the app I have paid for. If I couldn't block these ads, I would uninstall the app entirely and certainly not pay for a full version, since their presence makes the entire app unusable.
Adblock for android is buggy and corrupted. Nothing wrong with the chrome version though. I uninstall the android version a month ago. It needed to be pulled.
And if you can root your phone, you can certainly enable sideloading and say fuck you to Google Play.
I dumped the amazon market (and any apps I got there, like say the cute little photoshop thingy) because it kept shitting on my Nook Simple Touch. I'd have to FC it all the time. Now I have an Xperia Play but I'm still not adding it. You can say you don't need markets, but it sure is nice to get updates easily. So now I've added F-Store and I hope it doesn't shit itself...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This would be a bigger deal if you couldn't sideload apps. If you're savvy enough to want an adblocker, then you're usually smart enough to root and sideload.
This is why I use Android anyways. Google can control the apps on their store and I don't care. What I care about is that if I don't want to use them as a source I can just go get the same apps from another place and install them on my device.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
The pollution and energy consumption required to manufacture the new cars out weighed the pollution and energy savings of using the old cars throughout their useful life.
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
My guess is that this removal of ad blockers from Play is just the beginning. Google has made its anti-privacy position well known, and their Schmidt is so vehemently against user rights and freedoms that he'd probably have been a slaver a few centuries ago. Once a company has started down the path of evil, it only gets worse.
New Android facilities are going to be needed to control the information that apps can obtain after installation and the actions that they can perform. Done properly, apps should each run under a different Linux userid so that they can be isolated from each other and constrained by MMU hardware. Only then will the user be able to control what installed apps can do.
It's an engineering travesty, and a sign of Google's lack of ethics, that Google develops a platform which encourages downloading unknown 3rd party executables and running them. A decade ago, it was universally acknowledged that only fools do that, and pay the price. Now such foolish behavior has Google's blessing. Money is clearly more important than ethics and good engineering sense.
A fork is most definitely needed to look after the end user, because Google will not.
Small, fast (not the fastest but good enough), customizable, powerful, full of useful extensions, good philosophy... Do I need to go on?
If you publish ads, you're an asshole. You should be put in an iron coffin with spikes on the inside. There's nothing more to it.
There, FTFY.
Advertising is killing the web.
Every time I have the misfortune of having to use some benighted browser without adblock, I'm amazed at the amount of sheer CRAP that is forced in peoples' faces on the web. Let alone the goddamned exploits. What a useless waste of bandwidth.
That's what finally drove me to drop webOS and install Cyanogenmod on my touchpad. Guess I won't take any updates until they come to their fucking senses.
I'm certain sir Tim agrees with me fully.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I assume it's easy to just install an adblocking hosts file on android? That's how I do it on my Pre3 at the moment, with an ifup script that updates it when the phone detects it is on my home network.
hosts file
Oh no you DIDN'T!
I started using Chrome as my main browser a while back and recently switched back to Firefox due to some odd behavior with ad blockers. Browsing would quickly slow down to a crawl until I disabled the ad blocking extension I was using. It didn't matter which ad block extension it was - it had to be disabled for browsing to even work. Perhaps it's just coincidence but I sure as hell won't browse without an ad block extension anymore and since I couldn't find any solutions to this problem (tried several) - goodbye Chrome.
Fortunately they can also afford to ignore you. Let me let you in on a couple of little secrets of which you seem to be unaware:
1) Your ethics are your own, they are not necessarily held by others.
2) Whether users can afford an ad-free version or not says nothing at all about their right to determine whether adds are displayed on devices which are their own personal property.
That's not broken windows. The economic growth was postulated to come from subsidizing purchases directly. The property destruction was not designed to improve the economy, but to improve the environment by destroying highly polluting cars. The two were linked, but the essence of the breaking windows fallacy isn't the mere association between an action which destroys property and economic growth, but the causal nexus between the act of destroying property and economic growth.
if you can afford a smartphone and a phone control, you can damn well afford to pay a buck or two for the paid version.
Provided that you 1. live in a country where Google has made priced apps available, and 2. are old enough to have a bank account of your own allowing electronic payment.
Sideloading is a terrible idea for pretty much everyone, even the people who think they know what they are doing. You will become a part of a botnet.
Could you please explain your reasoning behind why this is true? I get most of my apps through Google Play Store, but I have sideloaded a few, such as Amazon Appstore. I imagine I'd have to sideload anything that allows the user to create and share simple apps, as that'd violate the non-compete in the Play Store distribution agreement.
Who funds the production of "a few games" that are distributed under a license for free software and free cultural works?
If you can, avoid getting a carrier branded phone.
A lot of people in Slashdot's home country can't because of how CDMA2000 service works in the United States. There's typically no removable CSIM; the carrier has to program the subscriber information directly into the handset, and carriers tend to refuse to do that on unbranded phones.
You can find source code for an hosts-based ad blocker here:
https://code.google.com/p/android-ad-blocker/
This reminds me of the extraordinary lengths that the RIAA goes to sustain a technologically endangered bussiness model. Google, which gives away the razor and sells ads on the blades, is threatened by ad blockers which are cheap and easy to implement. Only by simply denying that technology can google's bussiness model work.
On the one hand, I'm happy to get free stuff in return for ads so I'd like that to make google enough profit to continue. On the other, denying inevitability creates conflict. What makes this a hard choice is that, like the tragedy of the commons, sometimes market restrictions are required to create a liquid vibrant market. But at some point it changes to unnecessary restrictions to preserve an outdated business model (see RIAA). Google is in the early stages where ad based services are a good thing. But at some point those services will be cheaper and easier to proved under some other bussiness model and meanwhile in the absence of those google will be turning the advertising revenue know up to 11 and preventing those from taking off to last a bit longer.
Microsoft has a point with its scrooged campaign. THe fact that MS is not a saint doesn't mean they can't speak truth.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
As long as they don't prevent you from side loading, ( which isn't being done by Google if you are.. ) i don't see it as a big deal. Its their store, their rules and you can just go shop elsewhere without problem. Unlike apple which does restrict you to using only their store ( in theory, since jail-breaking isn't 'supported' ) so they are dictating what you can install in your device.
I dont mind this move, its perfectly understandable, what i'd like them to fix is the stupid way permissions work, now everything asks for access to everything, enough is enough if they want to keep growing as a platform they need to give the user more control by default or theyll keep forcing us to take root further to reclaim our ownership over our own freaking device
Maybe we need a market called something like Unplayed for stuff Google won't carry.
Who funds the production of "a few games" that are distributed under a [free] license
presumably the developer's day job
Developer, singular? Most programmers tend not to be skilled graphic artists, at least not to the skill level that even phone gamers have come to expect from professionally made games. To put acceptable art in a game, as I understand it, you need to hire someone to draw it, which means you need to plan for some source of revenue.
I never liked the HOSTS file approach to blocking ads, even on Android.
Instead, what I did was to setup a VPS with dnsmasq that is configured with entries from the latest ad-server namelists; now all my devices and machines can hit a single, poisoned DNS that is simple to maintain. As a bonus, it reduces latency because I also have httpd configured with mod_rewrite; the poisoned DNS entry in dnsmasq is the IP of the httpd instance which returns a single-byte-of-content, HTTP-200 (OK) response for any URL that is requested. Furthermore, most webpages reflow nicely if they get a basically-empty HTTP 200 response for a resource request, which makes this approach superior to the standard HOSTS file implementation that points back to localhost (ie. there are no "server is not listening" error messages in iframes, etc).
I cron'd the VPS to pull multiple ad-server namelist sources daily, update the poisoned entries in dnsmasq, and kick the service.
Solved once, solved everywhere.
Eat that, ad networks.
A very pernicious aspect of the smartphone market is that platform developers like Microsoft and Apple have drifted toward anti-Web attitudes and practices in an effort to give primacy to their tools (I suggest reading some of the /. commentary from when Apple banned adblockers). So the app markets for these platforms has been marred by an "apps not sites" tension that is often unnecessary.
It is very bad for the web if an advertising dichotomy is created between web and native apps. Its a signal that mobile app developers should give up on the web. It hardly matters that users can choose alternative app stores to get OS-level blockers, because authors will fear a majority who might not bother to switch.
Use a CyanogenMod, AOKP, or AOSP ("vanilla") ROM with OpenPDroid injected into it. Check the screenshots for the PDroid Manager app (configures the OS-framework hooks) to see what I mean.
Yes, you usually have to inject it yourself using the auto-patcher utility, but OpenPDroid solves all your privacy concerns (and far better than any iOS solution can ever do).
So, this solution requires the ability to use a command line (and install cygwin if you are a windows user); however, you're unlikely to ever find a mainstream device OS that is as privacy-secured for the user as you are able to achieve with OpenPDroid.
If you are really paranoid, also use DroidWall to prevent certain apps from having access to the network via iptables rules.
I had to load about six different ROM images onto my phone before I found one that would let me use GPS without leaking information to Google.
Interesting, how did you verify this? EtherApe?
Personally, I just loaded DroidWall blacklisted the kernel and the GPS process and called it good. Didn't bother to check further, because I rarely enable GPS anyway.
OpenPDroid takes care of the rest for me. I just block apps from being able to access my GPS or network location. Sometimes I like to have fun: I have OpenPDroid return false data to individual apps... "Why yes, I *am* at the Tunguska Event site in Siberia, and—wow!—my phone number coincidentally is 123-456-7890! What special promotions do you have for me today? Oh, you want to access my camera? Sorry, it's mysteriously offline right now.".
presumably the developers' respective day jobs
How do you recommend putting together a team of amateurs, including at least a programmer, artist, and composer, none of whom expect to get paid, to work on a single project?
[Citation Needed]
Also, understand that the intent was not to create a long-term net gain, but to infuse the market with temporary capital so that it would hopefully recover to the point that any lost long-term wealth would be more easily recouped.
Picture the economy as a train carrying a large load of coal up a hill. The train has run out of coal in the fuel stores, and some of the coal from the cargo could push it over the hill so that the remainder of the coal could be sold and the losses cut. The Keynesian economic view is to do just that. The Austrian view is that we must not touch that cargo at any costs! But the cargo loses value as it sits, as the train could be carrying another profitable load longer for every minute it sits there. Sitting there, hoping the train will magically arrive at the station in time to sell the complete load of coal for the complete expected profit can only lead to bankruptcy for the shipping company.
I've seen this story on other outlets and there seem to be posters on all of these sites calling those who use ad blockers scum for not allowing the sites/apps they visit to make they money they deserve. I think this group of users annoys me even more than the newbs who think they actually just won an ipod when they see the flashing gif.
It sounds like you've never played a single free (really free, released by the developer for the purpose of _helping people have fun_ and nothing else) game in your life.
My point is that amateur games tend not to have the comparable production values to major-label paid games, and people accustomed to professional production values are unlikely to buy a device if it supports only the Free games on F-Droid. How well did devices like the GP2X, GP2X Wiz, GP2X Caanoo, and Pandora, devices designed specifically for running amateur games, sell in the west?
And how much money and manpower was spent before VS after Google boucht the rights EXCLUDING marketing?
The vastly greater non-marketing resources spent on Android after the Google purchase makes a far bigger difference. If all it took was marketing - why isn't eveyone running Windows 8?
Unless you click on the ads, you point of unblocking ads for your favorite web sites mean absolutely nothing. The only thing you've done is allow advertisers to see you unblock ads for certain web sites, and they will target those site even more, until they clog the site forcing you to use add block on every site you like.
Droidwall. It is not an ad blocking application but it can be used to block ads. it is a firewall of sorts for your handset.
Regards
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Advertising should be opt-in, controlled by the user at any time.
At any time, a user living in a supported country can buy the paid version of a given application, which in the vast majority of cases contains no ads.
If you can't afford to do that, then you've got to come up with a plan to get there.
I was trying to explain one such plan: develop for Android until you've saved up the $1200 startup cost for iOS. Or are you implying that that plan is the wrong path?
Probably because free is not gratis (lat. grtia => for a thank you) . Free usually is a trick.
Want to block ads (or anything else that slows you down or infects you online with malicious script, OR makes you part of a botnet & more that's bogus)?
ADB (Android Debugging Bridge) & custom hosts file "how-to":
FROM -> http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1930156&cid=34713952
---
---
1.) Get ahold of the "Android Debugging Bridge" (ADB) & install it
2.) Mount your system mountpoint as READ + WRITE (as powerful of priveleges as you need is this)
3.) Using the PULL command, copy the file over from your PC (or even on your ANDROID if its there already) using PULL & overwrite the etc. folder's copy of HOSTS
---
DONE! Yes, it's THAT simple... &, it works!
(You *may* have to run a DosToUnix textfile formatting utility over the custom hosts you created if you generated it in Windows (say, via this app I created for it -> http://www.start64.com/index.php?option=com_content&id=5851:apk-hosts-file-engine-64bit-version&Itemid=74 which imports custom hosts file data for added speed, security, reliability, & even anonymity to an extent also from 12++ reputable + reliable sources online for such data))
APK
P.S.=> Block ANYTHING you want that way, AND, also speed up access to your favorite sites too (double-bonus) & also proof yourself vs. DNS flaws (like redirect poisoning since most ISP's are STILL NOT PATCHED vs. the Kaminsky flaw in that capacity) & downed DNS servers too, aiding reliability of access to your 'said favorite sites' as well...
... apk